The first thing users of the Linux operating system come face to face with is the shell. "Shell" is the UNIX term for a user interface to the system -- something that lets you communicate with the computer via the keyboard and display. Bash, the Free Software Foundation's "Bourne Again Shell," is the default shell for Linux, the popular free UNIX-like operating system. It's also a replacement for the standard UNIX Bourne shell, which serves both as a user interface and as a programming language. Like the FSF's other tools, bash is more than a mere replacement: it extends the Bourne shell in many ways. Features include command line editing, key bindings, integrated programming features, command completion, control structures (especially the select construct, which enables you to create menus easily), and new ways to customize your environment.Whether you want to use bash for its user interface or its programming features you will find Learning the bash Shell a valuable guide. The book covers all of bash's features, both for interactive use and programming. If you are new to shell programming, Learning the bash Shell provides an excellent introduction, covering everything from the most basic to the most advanced features, like signal handling and command line processing. If you've been writing shell scripts for years, it offers a great way to find out what the new shell offers. The book is full of examples of shell commands and programs that are designed to be useful in your everyday life as a user, not just to illustrate the feature being explained. All of these examples are freely available to you online on the Internet.This second edition covers all of the features of bash Version 2.0, while still applying to bash Version 1.x. New features include the addition of one-dimensional arrays, parameter expansion, and more pattern-matching operations. bash 2.0 provides even more conformity with POSIX.2 standards, and in POSIX.2 mode is completely POSIX.2 conformant. This second edition covers several new commands, security improvements, additions to ReadLine, improved configuration and installation, and an additional programming aid, the bash shell debugger.With this book you'll learn:

Cameron Newham

Cameron Newham lives in Perth, Western Australia. After completing a Bachelor of Science majoring in information technology and geography at the University of Western Australia, Cameron joined Universal Defence Systems (later to become Australian Defence Industries) as a software engineer. He has been with ADI for six years, working on various aspects of command and control systems. In his spare time Cameron can be found surfing the Internet, ballroom dancing, or driving his sports car. He also has more than a passing interest in space science, 3D graphics, synthesiser music, and Depeche Mode. Bill Rosenblatt is author of the the O'Reilly Nutshell Handbook® Learning the Korn Shell; co-author, with Deb Cameron, of Learning GNU Emacs; and a contributor to UNIX Power Tools. He is director of publishing systems at the Times Mirror Company in New York City and a columnist in SunWorld Online magazine on the World Wide Web. Bill received a B.S.E. from Princeton University and an M.S. and A.B.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, each in some variant of computer science. His interests in the computing field include multimedia databases, electronic publishing, and object- oriented systems. Outside of the computing field, he's interested in jazz, classical music, antique maps, and Sherlock Holmes pastiche novels. Bill lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He wishes his landlord allowed pets so that he could truthfully claim to have a dog and cat with suitably droll names like "Coltrane" and "Ravel."

Bill Rosenblatt

Bill Rosenblatt is president of GiantSteps/Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm in New York City. Before founding GiantSteps, Bill was CTO of Fathom, an online content and education company associated with Columbia University and other scholarly institutions. He has been a technology executive at McGraw-Hill and Times Mirror, and head of strategic marketing for media and publishing at Sun Microsystems. Bill was also one of the architects of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), a standard for online content identification and DRM.

Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The fish featured on the cover of Learning the bash Shell is a silver bass, one of the 400-500 species of sea bass. The silver bass, also known as the white perch, is found in freshwater bays and river mouths along the Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia to South Carolina, and is most abundant in the Chesapeake region. Silver bass live in large schools and feed on small fishes and crustaceans. Although many bass never stray far from one place their whole lives, silver bass swim upstream to spawn, often becoming landlocked in the process. Like most bass, the silver bass is attracted to bright, shiny objects, and they can be drawn quite close to swimmers and divers in this way. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks(R) help you tame them. ... Edie Freedman designed the cover of this book, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font. The inside layout was designed by Edie Freedman and Jennifer Niederst and modified by Nancy Priest. It was implemented in gtroff by Lenny Muellner. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 4.0 by Chris Reilley. This colophon was written by Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary.

This is a solidly written book that contained what I needed to learn the rudiments of bash. There are some advanced features I would like to see in it, but, all in all, I am glad to have the book as part of my library.

If you are a user of Linux/Unix, sooner or later you will need to use the shell. The Free Software Foundation's "Bourne Again Shell" is the most widely used. Learning the bash Shell Second Edition by Cameron Newman and Bill Rosenblatt is nearly indispensible in order to gain a fantastic working knowledge of the bash shell. The book is geared towards bash 2.0, but is also relevant to bash 1.x.

This book is written for beginners and takes you from the basics all the way to system administration. Even the old pros are likely to learn a trick or two. It covers features of bash all the way to the "wow, I didn't know bash could do that!" level. People have come to expect well written, easy to read, and professional books from O'Reilly and this title is no exception.

Chapter 1 starts with the basics. You will gain knowledge of the directory and file structure, how to install bash as your login shell, and the basics of interactive shell use. The successive chapters will take you all the way to system administration. Each chapter of the book builds on what you have learned in Previous chapters.

Chapter 2 teaches you about command line editing. You can put bash in edit mode and edit command lines just as you would edit text with a text editor.

Chapter 3 tells you how to customize your environment. One of the more useful things to me are aliases. Do you use a lengthy command quite often? Create an alias for that command and give your fingers a rest. The authors tell you how.

I am no guru, but I know my way around the CLI and one thing I found especially useful for me is Appendix B. It contains lists of options, built-in commands and variables, and I/O redirections among other commands.

The authors have provided tons of examples from commands to scripts and the major scripts are available for download from O'Reilly at the link above.

If you just want to be confortable using the command line interface or want to go all the way to a working knowledge of writing your own scripts and administering your system or a network, this is the book for you.

It's a must have for anyone using Linux/UNIX. I give Learning the bash Shell 5/5 Big Grins.

I can think of no higher accolade than to say that this book taught me exactly what I needed to know about the bash shell. I plan to make it a required text for the next session of our College's Linux course.